They're making hearts with their hair, recreating the precise shade of sepia that made everything look as sun-drenched as humanly possible, dancing and lip-syncing like its Music.ly all over again. The part that shocks me the most is not in fact how open some of y’all are with the state of y’alls photos from back then (don’t make me name names now), but the fact that Gen Z, watching this unfold, aren’t mocking it, they're actually joining in.

What we're witnessing is something deeper than regular nostalgia, and more necessary: the rehabilitation of sincerity itself.

Millennials were the lab rats of social media. We posted everything, everywhere, for no particular reason beyond the fact that we could. We documented our breakfasts and our breakdowns with equal fervor. We created massive, embarrassing digital footprints, the ruins of an ancient civilisation that reveled in sins Gen Z would never dare commit. No seriously, I get scared when Facebook tells me “Sophie, you have memories to look back on today”. God, no, please.

Gen Z learned from watching us get burned. They grew up seeing the cringe compilations, the receipts, the way the internet never forgets and rarely forgives. So they optimised for protection: private accounts, Close Friends stories, ephemeral content, and layers of irony as armor. If Millennials were earnest because they didn't know better, Gen Z became careful because they learned from our innocence.

But, the twist in all of this is, Gen Z seemingly wants that innocence back. They're nostalgic for a sincerity they never got to experience themselves. These edits go beyond standard appreciation; it's trying on an emotional vocabulary that feels forbidden in their own context.

That 2016 aesthetic: the Instagram sunsets with Helvetica overlays, the earnest vision boards, the unironic belief in personal transformation and social progress, got dismissed as naive precisely because those hopes didn't materialise the way an entire generation expected.

The cringe was a defence mechanism against disappointment. We're now in a moment where irony poisoning has run its course for many people. There's a hunger for permission to hope again, to be whimsical, and explore childlike happiness. But the conditions that made 2016 optimism possible don't really exist anymore. We're more informed, more exhausted and a whole lot more aware of systemic intractability. The question becomes: can you choose hope as a practice when it's no longer a default setting?

This is where the trend becomes more than aesthetic recycling. What we're witnessing is sincerity nostalgia, not longing for the past itself, but for the emotional posture it represented. A time when it still felt reasonable to be earnestly optimistic, before constant crisis mode became our baseline.

Here's the beautiful part: maybe in performing hopefulness, we become hopeful. You can't just decide to feel optimistic through sheer willpower, but you can do the behaviours, wear the aesthetic, engage in the rituals, and I guarantee that somewhere in that repetition, the feeling will catch up.

Think about how you fall asleep. You can't fall asleep by actively trying to fall asleep. The effort itself keeps you awake. Instead, you have to pretend you're already asleep. Get still. Close your eyes. Slow your breathing. The performance creates the conditions for the real thing.

Posting the sepia-filtered TikToks with Drake's "One Dance" blasting in the background is like a rehearsal. It's practicing the muscle memory of optimism. Doing the cringe earnestly enough times that it stops being cringe and starts being just what you do. Just how you are.

And there's something crucial about doing it collectively. One person being earnest in a sea of irony is vulnerable, exposed. But when enough people start performing hope together, even semi-ironically at first, it creates cover. It becomes safe to mean it.

The hope of 2026 would be fundamentally different from the hope of 2016. The earlier version was almost accidental, pre-reflexive, we didn't know enough to know better. Now, any return to optimism would have to be deliberate, chosen in full knowledge of everything that's happened since. And tbh that's actually what makes it more powerful. 2016 hopefulness was naive. 2026 hope would be an act of defiance.

Millennials who lived through 2016 the first time have a strange advantage here: they know what that hopefulness felt like from the inside. They remember the taste of it. And maybe that's their weird contribution to this cultural moment, being willing to be cringe again, showing that you can survive it, that there's something on the other side of self-consciousness worth reaching for.

Nostalgia isn't just about reliving the past - it's about rediscovering an idea that seems to have been lost. In this case, it's hope for hope itself. The belief that believing in something better might actually matter.

Apathy and irony served their purpose as protective mechanisms, but they've run their course. If we want to create a happier 2026, we need to start believing that better is possible. Not because we have proof, but because the alternative (being permanent detachment) is unbearable.

So we make the edits. We post the photos. We put on the sepia and lipsync for our lives. We perform hope until the performance becomes real. We pretend to sleep until we actually fall asleep.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to delete a 15-year-old FB status of my to do list, in which, the only task is to "marry Oli Sykes".

-Sophie Randell, Writer